G2's recent exploration of the joys (and horrors) of camping was pretty comprehensive, covering everything from the practicalities of sleeping under canvas to the controversial question of why some ethnic groups enjoy camping less than others.

On the surface, he appears to have a point. The popular impression of life on a campsite does sound like a communist utopia, where people share the potato-peeling duties and in the evening there is a big communal sing-song around a campfire. The parallels seem clear.

Until, that is, you actually go camping.

In a previous (and brief) career, I was an archaeologist. While digging holes in Bamburgh Castle, one of England's most striking, but least well-known, archaeological sites, I lived in a tent. For two and a half months. With a Welshman.

It was great fun. We enjoyed the beautiful landscape, we drank a lot of cider and, after running out of cider, we played drunken games of rounders in the dark.

It's true that our life on the campsite lacked many of the consumerist luxuries normally associated with capitalist urban living, but that was largely because the nearest Tesco was miles away and by the time we wanted to buy a job lot of Pringles or some more Rizlas no one was sober enough to drive.

The "rules of pay-as-you-go market exchange" were not suspended, but instead the mass market was simply replaced by a village shop two miles' walk away and a greasy spoon cafe on the campsite.

Instead of Sir Terry Leahy providing a bewildering range of cereals and two-for-one offers on beans, we had a chatty geordie lady who would cook delicious black-pudding sandwiches. Leahy would have envied her profit margins.

It would be wrong to mistake a lack of material wealth – reduced to living in tents rather than houses and playing practical jokes in the absence of a television – with an absence of capitalism. The people who could be bothered to walk to the village shop, or to drive to the supermarket, would still get a few quid for their trouble. Those who could afford it rented musty caravans rather than sleep on the ground.

We weren't rich, but that didn't make us experimental communists. Nor does camping induce a magical, selfless comradeship among those who pitch their tents in the same field. As we swiftly discovered, nothing is quite as funny as picking up someone's tent while they're asleep and moving it somewhere inconvenient, or hearing someone woken up by a burly archaeologist falling on to their rickety tent in the middle of the night.

Sure, if someone's guy ropes break or their tent pegs get stolen, their fellow campers will probably dig out some spare ones to lend to them. There is community on a campsite – but it has far more in common with the old-fashioned workings of a small village. You're either friends with your neighbours or you're stuck with them, so you help out when it's needed.

Communism has always been a daydream rather than a reality, and the same goes for the concept of camping as communism. From a distance, it's easy to get misty-eyed about shared ownership flourishing under canvas, but in practice it's still a load of drunk people living in a field.